Digital Strategy Catches Up With the Present: An Interview with The Smithsonian’s Michael Edson

We don’t have to wait to see if social media and crowdsourcing and mobile data in the cloud are going to add up to anything useful. It’s happened. These things are real, now today….We need to change our collective mindset from “let’s be cautious and wait to see how things are going to turn out before we commit” to “Let’s place the bet. Let’s get it done.”

An interesting thought experiment to analyse your system…

The basic idea of the Extraterrestrial Space Auditor is to put yourself in the mindset of an auditor from outer space—from way out of town, so to speak—with no bias or assumptions about your organization’s prestige or presumed value in society. The extraterrestrial Space Auditor’s only job is to look at your organization and compare its stated mission with what you are actually doing every day: how you’re spending your time, investing resources, hiring, firing, the kinds of meetings you’re having, the pace and velocity in the organization—the outcomes you’re achieving in society.

And a very succinct insight into why things don’t always progress as quickly as we might like…